Remember the days when Mel was running around shooting people with Danny Glover in "Lethal Weapon," making us all feel warm and cuddly about an intimate, on-screen friendship between a white man and a black man? Is this the same Mel Gibson who has now staked a huge amount of his wealth and all of his Hollywood prestige on making a movie that portrays Jews as demonic god-killers?
Is it the same Mel who, in the upcoming March Reader's Digest, shockingly told Peggy Noonan, when she asked him whether the Holocaust happened, "Yes of course. Atrocities happened. War is horrible. The Second World War killed tens of millions of people. Some of them were Jews in concentration camps. Many people lost their lives. In the Ukraine several million starved to death between 1932 and 1933. During the last century 20 million people died in the Soviet Union." Is he really so insensitive as to equate horrible casualties of war with a government program of genocide that turned more than six million people into ash, soap, and lampshades?
I once greatly admired Mel Gibson not only as a quality actor but as a quality human being. He was one of the few Hollywood celebrities who seemed devoted to his wife and family, and as a father of seven, I had great admiration for another father of seven who saw the blessing, rather than the burden, of having lots of kids. As a religious man, I was greatly inspired by his commitment to his Catholicism.
But all that is behind me now. Because whether Mel hit his head against a rock, or just decided to follow in the footsteps of his Holocaust-denying, anti-Semitic father, the Mel Gibson who first charmed us as an innocent-looking Australian soldier in Gallipoli seems gone forever. In his place has arisen a kooky religious fundamentalist who seems intent on reversing the reforms of Vatican II, which officially absolved the Jews of deicide, and who seems intent on convincing the world that, indeed, the Jews killed Jesus.
